Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [118]
It was the first movie of his that his mother came to see, and horror fans, not surprisingly, didn’t love it. Craven kept his career alive in horror by continually challenging the genre that he helped establish, but ask him about his role in horror and he will tell old stories about being shouted at in cocktail parties for making disgusting films and being derided by family members. Craven maintained his sense of being an outsider, even when he wasn’t one. Asked about revolutionizing the genre, surrounded by posters of his movies in his spacious office in Studio City, Los Angeles, he sighs. “All I am doing,” he says, “is rearranging the curtains in the insane asylum.”
AT THE time of the release of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty stopped speaking to William Friedkin because he felt that the director had turned his religious story into a morally indifferent shocker. They later reconciled. Friedkin refused to produce a remake, but in 2000, he agreed to rerelease the original movie with ten minutes of cuts restored that added the explanation of why the devil haunted that house. What was a story filled with ambiguity and mystery became what Blatty had always wanted: a religious morality tale.
Sitting in the backyard of his palatial Maryland home, Blatty smiles like a man who had lost the battle but won the war. He describes the rerelease as a major improvement. “It has a meaning more than a horror show,” he says. “Demons are real.” With Rush Limbaugh’s baritone booming on the radio inside his house, he talked about how Georgetown University, where he first learned about the story that inspired his movie, had lost its way. “I thought it was a Catholic institution,” he said. “There are demons running all over that campus. It’s pro-abortion.”
The new Exorcist is longer, and since it lacks some of the ambiguity of the original, its success at scaring depends to a larger degree on how frightening you find the prospect of the Devil. The special effects, especially Regan’s head-spinning, look a little dated. After all these years, Friedkin still refuses to call the movie horror. “It won ten Academy Award nominations,” he says. “How can that be horror?” He describes the fights he had with Blatty and says that he changed the rereleased movie as a favor. “I put it back in because I didn’t think it was that bad, and the film made so much money, why shouldn’t Bill have the movie he wants,” he says, sitting in the Plaza Hotel in New York, while in town to work on an opera, a new career for him.
Friedkin has changed, too. Once an agnostic, he initially rejected Blatty’s attempt to explain the horror with a religious message. But Friedkin softened his stance. Since the movie opened, he became more interested in Christianity and now sees the virtue in a different vision of The Exorcist. He calls the new cut of the movie a “gift” to Blatty.
At the end of a two-hour discussion about the movie, he raises the question that people have been asking him for over four decades. Why did people care so much about this movie? Friedkin pauses dramatically, as if he is about to reveal a secret that he has kept to himself for many years, and in a way, that is true. “It’s the mystery of faith,” he says grandly. “Why do bad things happen to good people? That’s the question.” Then he continues his point with what seems like a tangent, but actually is not. He raises the question of what motivated Adolf Hitler.
With an